Finally.
Journalist Noah Rothman is about to publish a new book. It is called Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America.
Blood and Progress is a corrective to the censored history of the left’s political violence in America, going back at least a century. I’ve obtained an early copy, and Blood and Progress is must-reading.
Here is the thesis as laid out by Rothman: “It is necessary to bring a gratuitous amount of evidence to bear in support of the observable fact that the American left—too often, fringe and mainstream alike—either refuse to confront or are disconcertingly comfortable with a certain level of domestic political violence. Indeed, its members will heartily protest the allegation that there is a rising tide of left-wing violence to speak of. They are inclined to ignore it, excuse it, explain it away, or marshal their own evidence in support of their belief that the American right is the font from which all political violence springs.”
Rothman emphasizes that he is not dismissing right-wing violence, only arguing that the media, academia, and politicians explain away the violence on their own side while trumpeting the problem on the right. Liberals will talk about January 6th for decades while watching their own cities burn to the ground or their children get assaulted by illegal immigrants.
In 1995, community activist Barack Obama launched his first run for the Illinois state Senate at the house of Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn. In 1970, Ayers and Dohrn were indicted for inciting a riot and conspiracy to bomb government buildings. Dohrn was convicted; Ayers was not. Ayers is not sorry, telling The New York Times in 2001, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Ayers and his fellow terrorists bombed the Pentagon as part of their anti-war activities. As journalist Bernie Quigley once put it, “Maybe we should begin to ask ourselves where we are going in our world today when a right-wing terrorist, resolute in his conviction to the very last, like Ayers, gets a quick and short ride to the death chamber and a shallow and forgotten grave, while bombers from the ’60s get tantalizing offers from Harvard, $100 million grants from Ambassador Walter Annenberg and dinner with [celebrity academic professors].”
In Blood and Progress Rothman goes through the long violent history of the Left, from the anarchists in the early 20th Century to the communists after the Russian Revolution to the anti-war rioters in the 1960s, then up thorough 1999’s Occupy Wall Street and 2012, when Floyd Corkins, a gay-rights activist, walked into the offices of the Family Research Council in downtown Washington and shot a security guard before he was subdued. After that came the Black Lives Matter urban riots and today’s anti-Trump clashes and pro-immigrant mayhem.
Through it all, there are liberal politicians, journalists, and civic leaders waving it all away. “I support the message to the establishment,” said Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. About Occupy Wall Street, the 1999 protest that would become violent. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, and it’s focused. And it’s going to be effective.” Obama also expressed his sympathy and support: “The protesters are giving voice to a broader-based frustration about how our financial system works,” he said at the time. Occupy seeks only to “rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street.” Just as Martin Luther King Jr. was “vilified by many, denounced as a rabble-rouser and an agitator, a Communist, and a radical,” Obama said, so, too, had Occupy been unjustly branded an anarchist mob by its detractors.
When there was an attempted assassination on Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022, Michael Schaffer of Politico wrote that the episode was “not especially hair-raising.” Of course, had something similar happened to Schaffer, he would be an instant media hero, claiming PTSD and appearing on NPR.
Rothman is critical of President Trump, writing that Trump “contributed to the sense that the primary danger to public safety came not from the left but from his supporters on the right.” The president “spent much of the 2016 primary season giving his followers permission to indulge in their own violent proclivities, goading his followers to “knock the crap” out of his detractors and saying he would “pay the legal fees” incurred by those who caught an assault charge. “Trump’s recklessness inspired much-deserved hand-wringing and conveniently blinded political observers to regular, kinetic acts of left-wing violence that were happening in response to his rise,” Rothman writes. This is a misstep in an otherwise outstanding book. Political rhetoric has always been pugnacious and used war analogies. It’s also largely protected speech. There is a world of difference between Trump’s rhetoric, which can even be seen as comical and slapstick, and the real-world actions of someone like Bill Ayers. No conservative has ever, thank God, shown up at the home of a Supreme Court Justice.
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